Importance And Usage Of Slugs In Your WordPress Websites

Slugs are the few words you see at the end of the URL address of a page or blog post, which describe what the page is about in brief. It could be the same as the title of your page or blog post, or could be something different. Whatever it is, it should be similar and relevant to what the page is about. You can use letters, numbers and hyphens while creating your slug. However, if you don’t create a slug for your page, WordPress will do it on its own by selecting the title of your page as the slug.

Why are slugs important?

Slugs are very important for the users as well as SEO purposes. Because a slug is the mini representation of your page or post, it will inform users what is present on your page, which might attract more traffic to your site from organic search. If users see that the permalink highlights just what they were looking for, they will be more likely to read the page. And this is what you want, right? More traffic coming in, more users going through your page, and more users connecting with you? So for this, you need to choose a good slug. What do we mean by “good” here? Read the blog below to understand.

How to choose the perfect slug?

Looking for the perfect slug to attract your visitors as well as SEO rankings? Here are a few things you must keep in mind while choosing a slug for your page.

Short and simple – As mentioned above, slugs are a mini representation of your entire page. So, make sure you keep it as short as possible. Remember that the biggest part of a URL is taken up by the slug. So, don’t overburden your visitors with a long permalink. Keep the words used in your slug to the minimum – only good enough to describe your page. A long slug will also not be useful for search engines and for optimizing your page. But make sure you use the “few” words in absolutely the right manner.

Include keywords – Keywords are important in all sorts of content; and this includes the slug too. Try to incorporate one of two important keywords in your slug to highlight it for higher rankings on Google so that more organic traffic can be gained. Be as relevant as you can and include one or two keywords so that your slug becomes the perfect guide of what is included in your page. However, don’t overuse the number of keywords.

Don’t change your slugs too often – Changing your slug is very important with WordPress as it lets you do it right away. But, do you know that this can have consequences? Editing the slug after the post has been published can result in a broken link for the hyperlinks given to the page, before changing the slug. Now, users will be redirected to a non-existing address, thus resulting in a lot of loss of traffic. This is why it is best to avoid changing your slugs, unless very necessary.

Apart from the slugs, there are innumerous elements that need to be taken care of and considered while building a page or website. For having a perfect website built with WordPress, with every element of the page been taken care of, you need to hire professional WordPress developers in Bangalore to help you.